We have reached a bit of a watershed with our child-to-child vision screening at Tahuna Intermediate school. Last week we reached 270 children. We went back to the school to catch up with the 19 children who had ambiguous scores when we did the first round of testing. At this point our scoring has become more complex, but the children seem to welcome this. We have now found that 13 children definitely need to go to see an optometrist.

We still have another 30 children who have not had a vision screening. One of our goals is that no child will fall through the cracks. This means that we have to ensure that our systems can catch every single child. We have been talking about ways that teachers can get children to enter their scores on a google spreadsheet, in much the same way that they enter their reading scores. This seems to be a distinct possibility and the teachers see no reason why the children shouldn’t do this.

We got some lovely coverage in the Otago Daily Times about this project.

https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/tahuna-pupils-trial-eyesight-testing-kit